Gamasutra spoke with Steve Fawkner at GDC 2008 and did what can be described as the post-mortem of the project. It's a nice overview of the current state of the gaming industry. The lessons they learned could benefit a company such as Nival Interactive for instance:

* Time spent polishing is time well-spent. The extra time spent certainly resulted in additional sales. Focus and usability testing makes a difference.
* Good design is still important: A graphically simple game can still sell quite well.
* Focus groups are awesome: the title change, the addition of female avatars, and the shifting of the style to something a little more anime in execution all turned out to be great changes.
* Good QA teams are even better than focus groups: even though a few bugs slipped through, a solid QA team really helps.

Read the rest of the report here.